The Boring Product People Talk About
Interesting products get talked about immediately and then stop. What sustains word of mouth is being cued by the environment, which is duller, harder to buy and the half nobody measures.
Key takeaways
- Berger and Schwartz analysed everyday conversations about more than 300 products, plus a field experiment across several cities and a laboratory study using real conversations.
- More interesting products received more immediate word of mouth, and no more of it over the following months, and no more overall.
- What predicted sustained word of mouth was being cued more often by the environment, or being more publicly visible.
- Campaigns are usually measured in the window where remarkability wins, which selects for the effect that decays.
- The study measures mentions rather than purchases, and nobody appears to have re-run the design on posting rather than speaking.
A bottle of Snapple with a true fact printed inside the cap. That is the object this whole field was built on, and it is a good one: a small surprise, free to produce, sitting where a drinker will find it. Jonah Berger uses it to open his chapter on social currency, and the logic is hard to argue with. People pass on what makes them look interesting.
Give that its due before taking it apart, because it is true and it has been measured. Interesting things do get talked about. What the measurement also found, in the same dataset, is that the talking stops.
Remarkability
The study is Jonah Berger and Eric Schwartz, in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2011, and the design is unusually broad for this literature. They took a dataset of everyday conversations covering more than 300 products, ran a large field experiment across several cities, and ran a controlled laboratory experiment using real conversations rather than stated intentions.
More interesting products received more immediate word of mouth. That is the finding everybody already believed and it held up.
Then the second half. Those same products did not receive more ongoing word of mouth over the following months, and they did not receive more overall. The authors say so directly, and they flag it as contrary to intuition, which it is. The remarkable thing gets a burst and then nothing.
Cue
What predicted sustained talking was different, and duller. Products that were cued more often by the environment, or that were more publicly visible, got more word of mouth both immediately and over time.
Not more interesting. More encountered.
The remarkable product wins the first week. The cued product wins the year.
This is the mechanism Contagious devotes its second chapter to, and it is the chapter of that book with the most evidence underneath it. A trigger is anything in the ordinary environment that brings the product back to mind: the time of day, a food you eat with it, a place you pass. The product does not have to be interesting at that moment. It has to be adjacent to something that happens often.
Hooked names the same machinery from the product designer's side, calling them external triggers, information sitting in the environment telling a person what to do next. Eyal is describing how to build the cue deliberately. Berger and Schwartz are reporting what happens when one exists.
Drift
Here is the consequence that follows from the finding itself, with no assumptions about industry practice attached.
The two effects have different time courses. Remarkability shows up immediately and is gone. Cueing shows up immediately and persists. Which means any measurement window short enough to catch only the first will rate the two as equivalent, and any window long enough to separate them has to run for months.
We are not going to tell you how campaigns are actually evaluated, because we do not have evidence on that and the obvious guess is not evidence. What we can say is that the shape of the effect makes the two strategies indistinguishable on a short measure and distinguishable only on a long one, and that whoever chooses the measurement window is therefore choosing which strategy can win.
Bounds
What the study will not carry, in descending order of how much it matters.
The conversational dataset is a record of what people said they talked about. It is a strong instrument by the standards of this literature, and it is still not observation of conversations. The field experiment and the laboratory study with real conversations exist partly to shore that up, and they do, without removing it.
Second, this is 2011, and the talking has moved. A conversation and a post are not the same act, because a post is permanent, addressed to an audience you cannot see, and visible to the platform's own ranking. Whether the immediate-versus-ongoing split survives that shift, we cannot tell you. As far as we can find, nobody has re-run this design on posting rather than speaking, which is a strange gap given how much money now depends on the answer.
Third, and this is ours rather than theirs: the study measures word of mouth, not buying. A cued product being mentioned more often for longer is a claim about mentions.
Use
If you are on the receiving end, the practical value is a question to ask about your own recommendations. When you tell somebody about a product, is it because the product is good, or because you had just walked past it.
Both happen, and only one of them is information.
The version worth keeping is narrower than the folklore and more useful. Making a thing remarkable buys a short spike. Attaching it to something that already happens in a person's week buys the rest, and the second is the harder job because it requires knowing what people actually do rather than what would impress them.
Which leaves the question the study does not answer and we would like somebody to take on. If the cue is what sustains the talking, and the cue is supplied by the environment and not by the product, then who is the credit for, and what exactly was the campaign buying?
Sources
Berger, J., & Schwartz, E. M. (2011). 'What drives immediate and ongoing word of mouth?' Journal of Marketing Research, 48(5), 869-880. Dataset of everyday conversations covering more than 300 products, a large field experiment across several cities, and a controlled laboratory experiment with real conversations. More interesting products received more immediate word of mouth but, contrary to intuition, not more ongoing word of mouth over multiple months or overall; products cued more by the environment or more publicly visible received more word of mouth both immediately and over time. Verified at the published record 2026-10-01. doi:10.1509/jmkr.48.5.869
Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Simon & Schuster. Ch. 2, Triggers, pp. 61-91, which is where the Berger and Schwartz product scoring is set out for a general reader. Read in full in this vault, 2026-09-02.
Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Portfolio. Ch. 2, Trigger, pp. 39-59, on external triggers as information embedded in the environment telling a user what to do next. Read in full in this vault, 2026-08-30.
A note on what this article does not claim: the outcome measured is word of mouth, not purchase, and the extension from spoken conversation to posting is not something either source tested.